We’ll have more details — including unit sales estimates — when the results of Fortune’s quarterly survey come in.

The main theme in the notes we’ve seen so far — including the one today from RBC’s Amit Daryanani, in which he raised his price target to $142 — is the continued strength of iPhone sales, especially in China. Six weeks after Asian New Year’s sales peaked, long lines still gather everyday outside Beijing’s Apple Stores.

Tim Cook’s conference call with the analysts will be live streamed. To get the link, go to Apple Investor Relations page a few days before the event.

Apple’s gay-rights bully pulpit

Two big news stories — one political, one technological — collided Monday on the op-ed page of the Washington Post.

Apple CEO Tim Cook used the page to take a stand against anti-gay “religious freedom” laws like the one signed last week in Indiana.

This isn’t a political issue. It isn’t a religious issue. This is about how we treat each other as human beings. Opposing discrimination takes courage. With the lives and dignity of so many people at stake, it’s time for all of us to be courageous.”

Cook’s message could pack some punch. He is the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company. And not just any Fortune 500 company, but one of the world’s most admired, with hundreds of millions of loyal, relatively well-heeled customers.

“America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business,” he writes. “That’s why, on behalf of Apple, I’m standing up to oppose this new wave of legislation — wherever it emerges.”

That Cook was willing to take sides on so divisive an issue only weeks before the biggest product launch of his career means a lot.

He has, in effect, thrown the weight of the Apple Watch — the marketing budget and the media spotlight — against those who would discriminate against gays in the name of their religion.

Cook has some credibility here. As a boy growing up secretly gay in a southern Baptist culture, he knows bigotry when he sees it. “Discrimination,” he writes, “doesn’t always stare you in the face. It moves in the shadows. And sometimes it shrouds itself within the very laws meant to protect us.”

Moreover, as someone who witnessed a KKK cross burning, he can speak with some authority about “the days of segregation and discrimination marked by ‘Whites Only’ signs on shop doors, water fountains and restrooms.”

These are fighting words, and it will be interesting to see how far Cook is willing to push it. He has some say, for example, in where Apple locates new factories, solar farms, data centers and retail outlets. (There are two Apple Stores in Indiana and only one in Arkansas.)

And rather than leave his fortune to charity, as he told Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky he would, he could give the Koch brothers a run for their money in tight political races where anti-discrimination is an issue.

Most analysts expect demand will be strongest for Apple’s aluminum and steel watches, which start at $349 and $549, respectively. Dediu believes Wall Street may be underestimating the intangible appeal of a $10,000 gold watch. Especially one given as a gift. Especially in China, with its rich tradition of over-the-top gift giving.

The gold watch has something else going for it. Unlike the value of a Rolex, say, which can range from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands, the price of the Apple Watch in each of its global markets is fixed; it’s listed on the website.

“It’s like currency,” says Dediu. Factor in local taxes, and you can calculate with some precision what he calls the “global arbitrage opportunities.”

For example, the entry level gold watch — 38mm 18-Karat Rose Gold with a white sport band — retails in the U.S. for $10.000. The same watch is listed on Apple’s Chinese website for RMB 74,800 ($12,045). Beijing imposes a 17% value added tax. Hong Kong does not.

“If someone smuggles one of these into China,” says Dediu, “they’ll pay for their flight ticket and then some.”

He reports that in Boston there were still queues for the iPhone 6 Plus in January, almost five months after it launched. “They’re mostly Chinese,” he says. “They’re doing it as a business.”

It can be a rough business, as a documentary film shot outside Apple Stores in New York City last September demonstrated. It might be even rougher in April, when buyers could be carrying bundles of cash in units of $10,000.

That’s cash that will go almost directly to Apple’s bottom line. Dediu estimates that the margin on a $10,000 gold watch could be as high as 90%.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if in the first few months the demand for gold is far, far higher than we imagined,” he says. “They’ll just be out of stock, permanently.”

ON THE OTHER HAND: 9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman, with good sources in Apple retail, says there will be no lines for the gold Watch.

No Waiting In Line: Unlike stainless steel Apple Watch and Apple Watch Sport customers, those seeking to buy the Apple Watch Edition will not have to wait in a line. Sources say that potential Edition buyers will have priority access to assistance, effectively skipping the line of other waiting customers. Experts will be able to help a couple of customers try-on Watches simultaneously, unlike standard employees who will simultaneously help as many stainless steel and Sport customers as necessary.

The first 24 Apple Watch apps

Pre-orders for the Apple Watch don’t begin for another two weeks and sales don’t begin for four, but the App Store team has already approved two dozen third-party apps for the new device.

The list below, scraped from the App Store by 9to5Mac’s Zac Hall, was presumably curated by Apple with a purpose. Initial impressions are critical for a device whose utility is still an open question.

These apps — and any others approved before April 10 — are the ones staffers will be showing customers in Apple Store test-drives. They will shape the initial impressions in the first wave of Apple Watch reviews. They will also get a huge leg up — a first-mover advantage — on the competition.

It’s an interesting list. All 24 are updates of existing iOS apps. Some are there to show off functions — as hotel keys, credit cards, airline boarding passes. Others target narrow interests — cricket, baseball, fantasy football. Some — like WeChat and AliPay — are pitched to the Asian market. Some, like SkyGuide, are probably there because they’re just so cool.

Report: Apple’s new music service will cost $10/month, no freebies

In the end, Apple just didn’t have the leverage. Even after spending $3 billion to acquire Beats. Even with Jimmy Iovine’s deep industry connections. Even with 75% of the music download business. Even with 800 million iTunes subscriptions.

Even with all that — or perhaps in part because of all that — Apple couldn’t get the music labels to agree to the deal it was pitching: An all-you-can-eat music subscription service from Apple for $2 less than the $10/month Spotify and Pandora have been charging.

The fact is, Apple is late to the party. Having stuck too long with Steve Jobs’ mantra “people want to own their music,” Apple got disrupted by start-ups that rent the music. Or give it away, with ads.

“This is one of the few times where Apple is playing catch-up, and not necessarily coming from a position of strength,” Bernstein’s Toni Sacconaghi told the New York Times.

But Apple’s got a Plan B.

With Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor on the inside, redesigning the Beats app, Jimmy Iovine has been outside, working the labels.

Mr. Iovine has set the tone of the transformation of Apple’s music plans, according to music executives. Mr. Iovine, who reports to Eddy Cue, Apple’s head of software and Internet services, has been leading aggressive talks to secure prominent album releases that will be exclusive to Apple, akin to what Beyoncé did when she released her self-titled album on iTunes in December 2013. One music executive involved in the negotiations described this part of the new iTunes as ‘Spotify with Jimmy juice.’”

Spotify with Jimmy juice. That has a ring to it. And if the exclusives are good enough, it might just work.

Short interest in Apple is near an all-time low

Short selling Apple, or any other stock, means selling shares you do not own or paying debts with shares you have borrowed. Substitute almost any other word for “shares” — say mansions or Mercedes — and short selling sounds almost fraudulent.

But I digress.

The point is, short selling Apple is a high-risk bet that the stock is about to go down, and as an investment strategy it has become increasingly unpopular over the past 12 months.

In December, in fact, short interest in Apple fell below 54 million shares — less than half of what it was in September and as low as it’s been, relative to outstanding shares, since December 2010.

What does this say about where the stock is headed next? I have no idea. All I can offer are the historical charts, with the usual proviso that the past is the past.

2005-2015: In this 10-year period, short interest peaked in April 2013, right as Apple’s share price was hitting rock bottom and starting a two-year climb.

1995-2015: Going back 20 years, short interest peaked in 1997. That was the year Steve Jobs returned to Apple and found the company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

British MPs to get new iPads, despite Candy Crush scandal

iPads for pols are a hot-button issue in Britain these days, ever since a London tabloid caught a Tory MP playing Candy Crush for hours during a House of Commons committee hearing on pension reform.

So when the opposition got wind of a government plan to equip all 650 members with $740 iPads — plus $300,000 a year in SIM cards and carrier charges — it was front-page news.

“As we saw with Nigel Mills and Candy Crush, MPs will be using the games, and the iTunes and other features on the iPad,” said Labour frontbencher Chi Onwurah. “Locking some of the most powerful people in the country into a platform that most of my constituents can’t afford seems like a mistake.”

In a plan announced Tuesday the House of Commons Commission said it would equip each member with a new Apple iPad — the iPad Air 2, according to AppleInsider — and a new laptop (brand unspecified) after the May general elections.

Commission chairman John Thurso disagrees. Although only 209 MPs use iPads today, he says, the government is already saving nearly $4.5 million a year in printing costs. And by sticking with iOS it will avoid the costs associated with training members on a new platform.

Cantor Fitzgerald sets Apple’s market value at $1 trillion

Cantor Fitzgerald’s Brian White, whose neck was already stuck out further than the rest of the sell-side Apple analysts, stuck it out even further Monday.

His old price target, $160, was the market high. With his new price target, $180, he’s betting that within 12 months Apple’s market capitalization (stock price times number of shares outstanding) will have passed $1 trillion.

To put that number in perspective, the total value of the gold mined in all of history, according to the World Gold Council, is roughly $8.5 trillion.

As White sees it, Apple is firing on all cylinders:

Next month, Apple will enter its first new product category in five years, while media reports over the past several weeks have highlighted potential new areas of future innovation. Also, we believe Apple’s iPhone portfolio and position in China have never been stronger. Finally, Apple has shown its commitment to returning cash to shareholders, and we expect more in April. We believe the combination of these forces will drive the market to reward Apple’s stock.”

Below: Our current spreadsheet of analysts’ 12-month price targets, as up to date as we can make it. Corrections appreciated.

The witching hour: How the algos took Apple down at Friday’s close

“There was no apparent news item in the afternoon indicative of anything dramatic for the company,” wrote Barrons’ Tiernan Ray Friday referring to Apple’s precipitous close. “Options expiration could have something to do with it, perhaps.”

There’s no “perhaps” about it. The last 60 minutes of the third Friday in March is what traders call a quadruple witching hour, when four different kinds of trading instruments expire simultaneously: stock index futures, stock index options, stock options and single stock futures.

It’s a moment when billions of dollars in high-roller bets — bets that the stock will close above or below certain pre-set “strike prices” — come due at all at once.

For high-frequency trading desks — and the algorithms that run them — it’s like the Fourth of July four times a year.

The fireworks hit for Apple on Friday in the last 60 seconds, when 13.5 million shares traded hands and the underlying stock fell off a cliff.

But the real action, says Global Equities Research’s Trip Chowdhry, was in those expiring options, the Puts purchased as a bet that the stock would fall and the Calls purchased as a bet that it would rise.

Options have long had a oversized effect on Apple, the hedge funds’ — and their algos’ — favorite trading vehicle. But this time was different. This was the first quadruple trading hour since Apple replaced AT&T in Dow Jones Industrial Average.

“The recent inclusion of Apple to the Dow index,” Chowdhry writes, “would have provided an excellent opportunity to short the Calls and long the Puts.”

In a note to clients Sunday, Chowdhry does the math. As result of Friday’s last-minute trading in Apple, he writes:

All Call options at strike prices 126, 127 and 128 expiring this weekend totaling 210,347 contracts, equivalent of 21 million Apple shares, become worthless. This could have net a profit in the order of a hundred million to the Short Call positions.

Paczkowski rocks: Buzzfeed’s star Apple reporter is earning his keep

I don’t know what it took to lure John Paczkowski from Re/code — a prestigious spin-off, once removed, from the Wall Street Journal — to click-happy BuzzFeed, but he seems to be earning his keep.

Re/code’s top Apple reporter was hired at the end of February by Mat Honan, a former Wired editor, to manage a rapidly assembled San Francisco bureau. (Among the new hires: reporters poached from the New York Times and the Nieman Lab.)

He’s also been feeding Buzzfeed’s insatiable maw with Apple scoops, real and conceptual, at the rate of one a week.

Today’s item, the one about Apple’s new TV set top box, is the top story on the closely watched Techmeme news aggregator.

I did mental spit-take when Stratechery’s Ben Thompson called BuzzFeed the world’s most important news organization. Now I’m wondering how Paczkowski’s journalism is going to fit with headlines like this, ripped from Friday’s front page:

Ex VentureBeat: When Re/code founder Kara Swisher reported on Honan’s new editorial role at BuzzFeed, she also noted that the media outlet was looking to poach certain Re/code reporters — a challenge she said she welcomed.